It's Like A Ghost Town Over Here

Steve - There's some great photos on Flickr if you search "ghost town" (although I added in Creative Commons licensing rules to my search).  No doubt blogging is well worth it.  I have no plans on stopping that (just try and stop me!).  My personal site is really doing well and the activity on it has been outstanding in the year plus I have been running it.  Posterous is so easy to use and allows me to blog short brief bits of info about San Antonio and what I've been up to, so I really enjoy it.  I have some specific plans for that which I'll begin concentrating on in the coming months.

Mark - I believe it was an old mining town in Northern California.  Aren't all ghost towns mining towns?  They always seem to be.

Hank - The name actually has history behind it (I didn't just claim to be a "Rockstar Real Estate Agent" as one might assume).  You can read about that here, " What’s In A Name? The Genesis Of RErockstar."  As for consumer-centric, I think the most consumer-centric site is one you build on your own.  Not to say that others aren't, just saying that it seems to be more consumer-centric than most blogging platforms available to real estate agents.

Paul - Yeah, I've been here for over a year now.  You've got a lot of reading to catch up on.  Haha.

Tim and Pam - Life gets in the way of everything, doesn't it?  Haha.  I actually like that about life - the challenge of finding the time to do all that you need/want is actually fun to me.  Perhaps I'm just a glutton for punishment.

Lisa - Missy Caulk (who later commented about it) does the cross posting thing.  I've never really done it (except for complete re-writes that lead back to the original).  My commenting on my own posts here at ActiveRain has definitely dropped off some.  Usually, I get to the first people that comment (after I've published the post), but the later comments usually get read and not responded to, unless there's something I feel I really need to say.  The "great post" comment will be debated around here for ever, unless they take away points.  I'd love to see an ActiveRain experiment where they took away the comment points and monitor the numbers for a month.

Irene - I think the biggest problem with Google and my ActiveRain outside blog (for me) is that when I blog here on ActiveRain, I'm selective about what I send to my outside blog.  I don't share the real estate industry-centric posts on the outside blog (unless I feel there is a need for people to know about the topic).  I view my outside blog as my consumer-centric arm of ActiveRain and that's where it's not performing well.  Interestingly enough, I use most of the same exact tactics (in SEO terms) there as I do on my personal site, yet my personal site blows it out of the water.

Steve - Thanks for reminding me that I still need to get my Fan Page built.  It exists, but it's not doing anything yet.

Bob - I read a lot of Jeremy's posts and am a big fan of his in general.  I think the real question for me is which direction do I want to take this blog and how do I do that without taking away from other projects (not in terms of time, but in terms of effect).

Missy - I know your strategy and (obviously) it works well for you.  You're an amazing blogger who works hard on so many different sites it's a wonder you have any time in a day!  I think my big concern is that my ActiveRain blog brings me more benefits (consumer-centric) than my outside blog.  I would like to think that the outside blog would perform better in terms of consumer use, but I can see from statistics that it just doesn't happen like that.  My outside blog gets most of it's traffic from referrals (here and when I post links to ActiveRain posts I usually use the outside blog address) and very little from keyword searches.  Yet I employ the same SEO tactics on my main site and it does phenomenally well.  Just hard to figure out why.

Chris and Stephanie - Glad to hear you started up a Wordpress site.  If you ever have any questions let me know.  I love the Wordpress platform and it's probably one of the easiest things to use.  There's a lot of great SEO-related plugins (they make a plugin for just about everything you can imagine - try visiting my site with Internet Explorer 6 - that's a plugin that generates that warning).  I'm definitely "in it" (up to my eyeballs).

Don - Love the photo.  I was named "Mr. Zero-60 in 30 Days" by my broker and her sister at our company party yesterday.  I loved the title.  You know, I've never been to Bracketville - I've heard the name, but didn't know about the Alamo replica.  I'll have to check into that.

Just so I'm clear...I'm not going anywhere.  I am not leaving ActiveRain or anything like that.  What I am doing is spending a lot more time concentrating on my main blog (which has always been my focus as it is my complete package site - IDX, blog, marketing, etc.).  It's also the holidays and things have been a bit hectic and my brain has been a little dry lately.  I had some ups and downs with my health that threw me for some loops too (nothing bad, just annoying things that kept me from working as hard as I would normally).

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and leaving all the comments.  Don't worry, you won't get rid of me that easy.